Black & Blue is the first systematic description of how
American doctors think about racial differences and how this kind of
thinking affects the treatment of their black patients. The standard
studies of medical racism examine past medical abuses of black people
and do not address the racially motivated thinking and behaviors of
physicians practicing medicine today.
Black & Blue
penetrates the physician’s private sphere where racial fantasies
and misinformation distort diagnoses and treatments. Doctors have
always absorbed the racial stereotypes and folkloric beliefs about
racial differences that permeate the general population. Within the
world of medicine this racial folklore has infiltrated all of the
medical sub-disciplines, from cardiology to gynecology to psychiatry.
Doctors have thus imposed white or black racial identities upon every
organ system of the human body, along with racial interpretations of
black children, the black elderly, the black athlete, black
musicality, black pain thresholds, and other aspects of black minds
and bodies. The American medical establishment does not readily
absorb either historical or current information about medical racism.
For this reason, racial enlightenment will not reach medical schools
until the current race-aversive curricula include new historical and
sociological perspectives.